Today, on the way home from a two hour car trip, Ethan informed me that he had written a haiku about boring math. He didn’t quite hit the structure, and so I told him to keep at it, and then I took my own advice and started composing a haiku about the wind. I found it to be a fun exercise in form and meaning, but I have to be honest, that I felt a little pretentious at the thought of posting it, and yet, I’m gonna post it anyways. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my haiku:

It Says I Am Free

The wind on my face,

I don’t know where it comes from.

It says I am free.

*******

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

*******

Beyond using a great analogy to effectively describe the nature of Postmodernism, what particularly stood out for me in Wallace’ articulation was his question, “Is there something about authority and limits we actually need?” Being a Xian, I, of course, respond to this question with a resounding “Yes!!”. And yet, I am mostly glad for the “patricide” that postmodernism brought to us as a culture, as I do not think that postmodernism needs to be interpreted as that era in which humanity finally cast aside their ignorant and stubborn parental myths. Rather, it could be seen as a time of tearing away the false masks that we have placed onto God throughout human history. I realize that Wallace, in talking about the absence of parents, may not have been making a theological assertion, but rather was referring to the collapse of the intellectual foundation upon which Western history was built: the collapse of absolutes and universals. If this is the case, however, it does not change my response, as I think that in either case a healthy unmasking has occurred. So, finally, in reference to Wallace’ statement, what this means for me, is that there are parents, or particularly there is a Parent, the face of whom we have never clearly seen, and the nature of whom may very well surprise us. My guess is that this surprise would be very much like when a baby was born to lower middle-class parents within a marginalized culture, who as rumor had it, was the very Son of God.

Bars Poetica

This is the story I’ve tried to tell. Guy
exists. Father mother sister brother.
Oh pretty stars, oh bastard moon
I see you watching me. The trembling
years leading to sex, the trembling sex.
Death as garnish. Death as male lead,
female lead, death as a cast
of thousands. God in, on, as, with,
to, around, because who knows
because. All the while feeling air’s
a quilt of tongues, that spaces
between words are more articulate
than words. It’ not like you’d hope,
that anyone can make sense.
Look around you, let your ears
breathe deep — almost no one does.
Have another drink. When they throw us out
there’ a place down the street
that never closes, after that
we’ll climb a fire escape and praise
the genealogy of light. The Big Bang
sounds like what it was, the f***ing
that got everything under way.
That love was there from the start
is all I’ve been trying to say.

I am enjoying translating poetry as it pushes me to connect more deeply with what I am reading, and it sparks my imagination for possibilities that I might pursue in my own writing. I can imagine that translation will be a regular part of my life, perhaps as a creative discipline to sharpen my own skills and expand my creative repertoire. Whatever the future may hold for me and translation, in the present I hope you enjoy this poem.

You enter the dark room
as on a bed of dreams

all say the name of the impalpable
all look and weigh
the unseen

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’ beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

This translation was prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University

What were we looking for
when I walked in?
While you both embraced
in the dark and silence,
I searched
for a pack of smokes.
My Lungs longing,
both your lips pressed,
we groped the darkness
for fire and flesh.
While lying naked under sheets
that withheld the aroma
of your sex and sweat,
I found my smokes, lit one
and dragged hard
till my lungs were bursting
and your bodies were aching,
and we released
the smoke that rises
like incense
to an unknown
god.

What we know comes to so little,
what we presume is so much,
what we learn, so laborious,
we can only ask questions and die.
Better save all our pride
for the city of the dead
and the day of the carrion:
there, when the wind shifts
through the hollows of your skull
it will show you all manner of
enigmatical things, whispering truths in the
void where your ears used to be.

Why do we tell stories?

To give you further avenues to explore, consider the following related questions: What do you think it is that attracts us to stories. What is the function of stories within a culture? On what basis do we consider a story worthy of hearing. How is meaning derived from stories? How are stories deemed to be true?

When we think of the nature of stories our tendency is to think that it is merely the product of the imagination, with the implication that it is something other than reality. In responding to the above questions, consider the possibility that our understanding of reality is constructed through the same processes that stories are created.

In closing, think about this. If I was to ask you who you are, would you respond by giving me a list of facts or would you give me some kind of story?